Hit The Lights! Presents Two Original Works In Minnesota Fringe Festival

Hit The Lights! Theater Co. (HTL!) is please to present two original works as part of the 2018 Minnesota Fringe Festival. In their shadow play WHALES, inspired by punk rock, interactive game shows, documentaries, and Herman Melville's seminal masterpiece Moby-Dick, HTL! invites you to catch a glimpse of the world that brought us a certain legendary white whale and the men that hunt him. In HORSETALE, part of Family Fringe, a Horse and his Tail become separated and in their search for each other, find themselves. HTL! weaves together handmade shadow puppetry, three vintage overhead projectors, live original folk music, and American iconography to tell a story as wild and expansive and intimate as the West itself.

Hit The Lights! Theater Co. is an award-winning company created out of an artistic agreement to tell simple stories through unconventional ways. Using found materials, cardboard and various sources of light, HTL! specializes in the transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary. HTL! also focuses on the interplay between darkness and light, utilizing shadow puppetry as the lifeblood of their storytelling. The company is comprised of six experienced multidisciplinary artists: puppeteers, actors, musicians, artisans and everything in between. The work is of a heightened style, hyper-theatrical in nature, with performers multitasking onstage in real time to create the technical, musical and narrative components of a story simultaneously. Believing that motion, color, sound and atmosphere are more evocative and experiential than spoken text, a heavy emphasis is placed on dialogue-less, action-oriented storytelling.

Original works include DUNGEON (Audience Pick of the Fringe at the Cincinnati Fringe and Editors Pick at the Minnesota Fringe), WHALES (nominated for three Innovative Theater Awards including Outstanding Innovative Design, Outstanding Original Music and Outstanding Premiere Production of a Play) and a world premiere immersive theater experience, THE OTHER RHINE (Know Theatre of Cincinnati). HTL!'s Off-Broadway credits include their original performance of HORSETALE at Ars Nova's 2017 ANT Fest, La MaMa ETC Puppet Slam, DUNGEON twice at Ars Nova One Night Stand, ISLA at Dixon place and most recently ISLA at Ars Nova where Hit the Lights! is currently Company-in-Residence.